Friday, July 4, 2025

"How Donald went to war" by Dmitry Orlov

 

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Source: Club Orlov

Jul 02 06:18

How Donald went to war

Who won? To get at this question, let me tell you a story. Some might call it a "narrative" but it's really just a story. I'll let you decide whether it's entirely factual or somewhat fictional (some persnickety people can always point out some details that just don't fit the overall picture) but I will try to keep it as grounded in fact as I can.

Once upon a time there was a country called Usania which was (ostensibly) run by nutcases. There were plenty of sane Usanians to choose from but none of them wanted to be president. As the great Usanian writer Kurt Vonnegut aptly put it, "only nutcases want to be president." This was because, nutcases or not, presidents were not allowed to run Usania but only pretended to do so because of something called "checks and bounces". Or something like that. And this dissuaded non-nutcase Usanians from trying out for such a silly job.

And given that they were, as it were, all nutcases, the presidents were, quite wisely, not allowed to actually run Usania and this prerogative was secretly handed over to shadowy players who were kept out of the public eye as much as possible. These apparatchiks never faced public scrutiny and never stood for elections; consequently, there was no corrective feedback mechanism that could have weeded out the idiots, the psychopaths and the cleptomaniacs from their midst. Total degeneracy ensued, creeping up slowly at first, then bursting out into the open when the entire world was forced to bear witness as around Anno Domini 2020 Usania became an unreformable, ungovernable, internally conflicted mess.

Right around this time Usania ran out of nutcases who wanted to be president, and so they "elected" (in a manner of speaking, for Usania was never really a democracy) a senile old man named Joe who had never worked a day in his life (smelling up the halls of congress doesn't count) and stumbled through his four years as the supposed Nutcase in Chief, attempting to shake hands with ghosts, sniffing and biting people and spending most of the time in hiding while the apparatchiks forged his signature on countless official documents, including ones that pardoned them from any offenses, real or imaginary, that they may or may not have committed or were perhaps planning to commit.

When the "election" time rolled around and Joe's incapacity became shockingly obvious, he was hastily replaced with a mentally retarded Indian woman whose qualifications for the high office were her lack of testicles and her fashionably dark skin — that and her mad cackle, which indeed qualified her as a nutcase. As her feeble-mindedness became a matter of public discourse, she lost the "election" to a proper nutcase: a narcissistic bloviating buffoon named Donald, who had previously taken a stab at being Nutcase in Chief, with disastrous consequences, but showed up for more of the same anyway. His qualifications for leadership included his experience in running real estate swindles, organizing gambling institutions, running contests for large-breasted, toothy women and fake wrestling competitions and playing the lead role in reality shows with lots of peons where he got to say "You're fired!" whenever one of these peons screwed up.

During the tenure of the brain-dead Joe the apparatchiks came up with a truly harebrained plan to overthrow Russia's dread dictator Putin. This had been an idée fixe for these apparatchiks for a long time. They armed and trained some Ukrainians, the Ukraine being a piece of Russia which it had temporarily sloughed off during the dissolution of the USSR, as Russia would sometimes do, being such a large country and at times difficult to hold together. The apparatchiks ordered the Ukrainians to attack the Russians living in what was at the time the eastern part of the Ukraine, forcing Russia to intervene to protect its people. A clinical example of delusional thinking, the apparatchiks thought that the demoralized Russian troops would throw down their rusty weapons and run away, the Russian government would fall apart and the Russian people would rise up and overthrow the dread dictator Putin. Somehow, they had failed to notice how over the course of Putin's long reign Russia has once again become rich, prosperous, very well armed and expertly managed. They also neglected to notice that Putin consistently enjoys approval ratings of around 80%, making it highly unlikely that the 20% who do not wholeheartedly approve of him could be induced to revolt and to overthrow him. A nasty and prolonged armed conflict ensued in which over a million Ukrainians and tens of thousands of Russians lost their lives.

By the time senile old Joe was turned out to pasture and bloviating buffoon Donald once again became Nutcase in Chief, it had become abundantly clear that the Ukraine had lost the war, with the frontline advancing in Russia's favor slowly but relentlessly. Donald's handlers did their best to portray this defeat as senile old Joe's fault and made several misguided attempts to stop the carnage, but that simply wasn't enough. What Donald's quickly fading public image needed was a whole new military victory. Then the Usanians, who have attention spans of between 6 and 8 minutes, conditioned by standard sitcom segment length, would forget all about the Ukrainian defeat and only think about the great new victory.

But where to start a war? Bibi, the Israeli prime minister, who had been holding onto this position for dear life in order to avoid going to jail for corruption, offered to help: why don't we attack Iran with the excuse of having to destroy its nuclear weapons program (which Bibi thought up based on no information) and replace its government with one that Donald and Bibi would like? Donald's apparatchiks jumped up and down with glee and off they went to war. Israel launched a campaign of political assassination against the Iranian leadership by activating sleeper cells inside Iran which Israel had been cultivating since around 2010. The mighty Usanian military then swung into action and made some impressive-looking bomb craters at the entrances to the cave in which, the Usanian apparatchiks reckoned, Iran's nuclear bombs might be hiding.

Needless to say, the war went just as badly as the one in the Ukraine, but it only took 12 days instead of three years to reach the stage of total fiasco. Bibi then begged Donald to make the Iranians stop lobbing rockets at Israel that were steadily destroying Israel's ports, oil refineries, military facilities and electric grid. Donald then opted for Plan B — of playing the peacemaker — and told Israel and Iran to knock it off. When they didn't immediately knock it off but continued lobbing missiles at each other, he dropped some f-bombs. Eventually the rocket duel did stop, and Donald started looking forward to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. What he got instead was a rather large scandal over his handling of the issue of Iran's reputed nuclear weapons program, calling into question whether such a program existed at all and, if so, whether Donald's attack on it destroyed it, slowed it or hastened it.

"Now What?" by Patrick Lawrence

 

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Source: ScheerPost

Patrick Lawrence: Now What?

 July 3, 2025 
A U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit is prepared for operations ahead of Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, June 2025. United States Air Force, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

On one hand, you have the White House, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, insisting and insisting again — insisting too much, methinks — that those B–2 bombers that flew over Iran two Sundays back, June 22, obliterated the nation’s nuclear program just as President Trump hastily claimed as soon as the operation was completed.

Hegseth at a news conference with Caine four days later: “U.S. attacks have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program …. You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated, choose your word. This was an historically successful attack, and we should celebrate it as Americans.”

Trump, at a news conference the next day: “The place was bombed to hell …. The last thing they’re thinking about now is nuclear weapons.”

And in the background you have the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency performing Difficulty 5 back flips as they repudiate initial assessments of limited damage to the Iranian nuclear program so as to conform to the Trump regime’s “obliterated, destroyed, defeated” narrative.

On the other hand, you have reports that the Iranians, warned in advance the “bunker busters” would fall on the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites, removed their 400–kilograms of enriched uranium, not quite 900 pounds, to secret locations. Immediately after the bombs fell, Amwaj.media, a British-based digital publication that covers West Asia in English, Arabic and Farsi, reported this, citing “a high-ranking Iranian political source [who] also confirmed that the targeted sites were evacuated, with ‘most’ of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium kept in secure locations.”  

“How can you tell,” Reuters asked in a June 29 report, “if enriched uranium stocks, some of them near weapons grade, were buried beneath the rubble or secretly hidden away?”

You cannot, it seems to me. Neither can President Trump or any of his adjutants. 

Then you have the granular analysis of reputable technologists such as Ted Postol, the gentlemanly scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has over many years exploded more false flags, propaganda ops, and other such ruses than you’ve had hot dinners.

There is satellite imagery showing 16 tractor trailers lined up at Fordow in the days before the B–2s flew. Trump insists they were pouring concrete, a peculiar use of a truck of that sort, I have to say. It is magnitudes more plausible they were there to load the steel drums in which enriched uranium is commonly stored and shipped.

Postol gave the heavy-on-the-science interview to Daniel Davis, an Army veteran who now podcasts as a respected military analyst, after the Hegseth–Caine press conference. In the course of it, the joint chiefs chairman went full monty with slides, diagrams, satellite images, and graphics to show (or is snow my word?) the assembled reporters just how true the obliterated-destroyed-defeated story is.

“What it clearly shows is that the bottom of the shaft [formed by the bombs] is still sealed,” Postol said of Caine’s presentation. “Caine is probably a good soldier, but he doesn’t know much science. You cannot succeed with this kind of attack. It was destined to fail.”

Postol also proves astute as to the political dynamics of the administration’s shape-shifting accounts of the Iranian mission: “This is a circus, a political circus to try to minimize the embarrassment to President Trump for having spoken without any knowledge.”

Where are we, then? As Postol points out during his exchange with Davis, “You can’t trust the media and you can’t trust the intelligence community.” What happened and what is going to happen next? These are the questions we are left to consider more or less on our own.

Strange as it may seem, I find it easier to anticipate the future than to conclude with certainty what it is that those B–2s and their 30,000–pound bombs actually got done.

It may be that we are doomed never to know the extent of the damage the Air Force’s aerial operation caused. But, staying short of convictions as we must, I put my stock in those reports that the Iranians had advance notice that the B–2s were coming. I have heard no official denial on this point. And so much of contemporary warfare is weirdly choreographed, after all. In this case, telling Tehran the battle plan would serve to reduce the danger — danger the International Atomic Energy Agency warned of prior to the operation — of a catastrophic release of radioactive material into the atmosphere.  

And there is the science, such as unscientific minds, mine among them, can understand it. I have found Ted Postol a careful, persuasive witness ever since he discredited those false-flag chemical weapons incidents in Syria at the height of the Western-run operation to bring down the Assad regime. Take a look at the video of his talk with Daniel Davis. He did the same thing this time: Here are the physics, here the thermodynamics, this is what would have to have happened if the obliteration story was true, and here is how we know it did not happen.

As to what is likely to come next, we can usefully read events as mirrors of intentions.

I think it is true that Hegseth, Caine and others among Trump’s sycophantic appointees are protecting the president from ignominy — or more ignominy, better to say — as they flood the zone with pseudoscience and, in Hegseth’s case, shrill exhortations to print and broadcast media to stop with the reporting and get with the patriotic propaganda. (Read the transcript linked above for the full taste of these crude harangues.)

But there is more to President Trump than his obvious concern for appearances. In my view he is very eager to avoid any circumstance that would require another American air campaign in Iranian airspace. He wants neither the risk nor the responsibility. This is how, paradoxically, I read his warning the other day that he will bomb again if Iran resumes its enrichment processes. When Trump drops threats like granite boulders we can read in them what he actually wants. In this case it is another way of saying, “Please stay with the ceasefire and short of the nuclear stuff.”

With Trump, it is as it was with Joe Biden and numerous of their predecessors. One can never tell the extent to which Trump, is willing to restrain the Israelis as they advance their aggressions — which any American regime could do in very short order — and the extent to which he pretends to be willing to restrain the Israelis but has no intention of doing so because of the Israel lobbies.  

The New York Times ran a report Monday, June 29, under the headline, “Israel’s Military Appears Poised to Expand Into Gaza City Amid Cease-Fire Calls.” While Trump and his national-security people press for a ceasefire in Gaza — with what degree of vigor we do not know — the Zionist state just ordered Palestinians to evacuate the Strip’s main city after not operating here for many months. So they seem to be going in yet again. “There has been no advancement in the ceasefire talks,” The Times, quoting two Israeli officials and another unnamed source, reported.

This development has nothing and everything to do with Israel’s current posture toward Iran, as I interpret it. Israel has as little intention of ceasing its operations against Iran, now that they are finally underway, as it does to end its genocidal ethnic-cleansing of the Palestinians of Gaza. These aggressions are both fronts in what the Israelis call their “seven-front war” across West Asia, and we must not lose sight of this. We witness a thematically unified campaign of terror. There is no place in it for ceasefires, peaceful coexistence or anything else short of total victory.

As in Gaza, so in the West Bank, and as in Gaza and the West Bank, so in Lebanon, and as in these three, so in Iran. I see no chance whatsoever that the Israelis consider themselves done with the Islamic Republic. Destroying the nation’s nuclear program, wrecking the economy and essential infrastructure, creating a state of political chaos, assassinating or otherwise decapitating the leadership: All this appears to be under discussion among Israel’s war planners.

It is merely a matter of time before the Zionist state resumes its aggressions. Then there will be more questions, chief among them what the United States and the rest of the West will do as more barbarities unfold before the world’s eyes.

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

"Control, Crisis and Compliance: Endgame Logic of Late Capitalism" by Colin Todhunter

 

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Source: OfffGuardian

Control, Crisis and Compliance: Endgame Logic of Late Capitalism

Colin Todhunter

It must be made clear from the start that, drawing on the work of sociologist Max Weber, capitalism is an ‘ideal type’ concept. An ideal type is a conceptual tool that highlights certain key characteristics of a phenomenon by accentuating some elements while omitting others. It is not meant to perfectly correspond to any specific real-world instance but serves as a construct to analyse and compare social or economic phenomena.

This framing is critical: while capitalism is often described as a system of free markets and voluntary exchange, in reality, it frequently relies on collusion, corruption and state-corporate coercion and violence. Having stated this, as an economic system, capitalism inherently requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand to sustain profitability.

However, as markets saturate and demand falls, overproduction and overaccumulation of capital become systemic problems, leading to economic crises. When capital cannot be reinvested profitably due to declining demand or lack of new markets, wealth accumulates excessively, devalues and triggers crises. This tendency is linked to a long-term decline in the capitalist rate of profit, which has fallen significantly since the 19th century.

Neoliberalism’s playbook

Capitalism in the form of neoliberal globalisation since the 1980s has responded to these crises by expanding credit markets and increasing personal debt to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages are squeezed or they are made unemployed.

Other strategies have also been deployed. These include financial and real estate speculation, stock buybacks, massive bailouts, public asset selloffs, regulatory ‘reform’ and subsidies using public money to sustain private capital and boosting militarism, which drives demand in many sectors of the economy (one reason why Germany and other European countries are following in the footsteps of the US by boosting their spending on militarism and creating bogeymen as a justification).

These financial manoeuvres are not isolated tactics but part of a broader neoliberal agenda that also involves deregulating international capital flows and exposure to global capital markets, resulting in the obsession of maintaining ‘market confidence’ to hedge against capital flight and surrendering economic sovereignty to finance capital. We also see the displacement of production in other countries in order to capture foreign markets.

This global expansion of neoliberal capitalism is a form of imperialism, where powerful corporations and financial interests impose structural adjustments and policies that undermine local economies, especially in the Global South. The capture of new markets abroad is essential for capital accumulation and offsetting potential declining profitability at home.

This imperial dynamic is particularly visible in the agricultural sector. For instance, the process involves the destruction of indigenous rural economies, the imposition of chemical-dependent industrial agriculture and transformation of food systems to benefit global agribusiness oligopolies. Think too of the profit-driven technofixes being rolled out by Big Tech and Big Ag: the ultimate commodification and corporate capture of knowledge, seeds, data and so on under the crisis narrative of impending Malthusian catastrophe.

And this alludes to the fact that capital seeks ideological cover for its financial ambitions. The climate emergency narrative is being used to legitimise new financially lucrative instruments such as carbon trading and green investments, schemes designed to absorb surplus wealth under the guise of environmentalism. This reflects a broader pattern where perceived (or manufactured) crises are exploited to create speculative markets and investment opportunities that maintain capital accumulation.

COVID and Ukraine

This logic reached a new intensity during the COVID event, which provided a stark and recent illustration of how the ongoing crisis of neoliberal capitalism is exploited and managed, serving as a critical phase in its evolution. This event and associated lockdowns amplified structural inequalities and reshaped the dynamics of capital and control.

COVID was used as a strategy of ‘creative destruction’, accelerating the destruction of millions of livelihoods globally and pushing small businesses towards bankruptcy. Rather than providing genuine aid to the public, COVID policies and massive government spending primarily benefited large corporations—boosting their margins while forcing smaller enterprises to the brink and consolidating corporate power.

At the same time, COVID was used to justify unprecedented restrictions on freedoms, increased surveillance and digital control mechanisms. More on this later.

Lockdowns helped reshape capitalist accumulation patterns by externally imposing economic shutdowns that monetary policy alone could not achieve. They created conditions for increased indebtedness for households, small businesses and (Global South) nations, corporate bailouts and the imposition of new forms of control, thereby managing the contradictions of capitalism through non-market means.

According to Prof. Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University, financial markets were already collapsing before lockdowns were imposed; lockdowns did not cause the market crash in early 2022 but were imposed because financial markets were failing. Lockdowns effectively turned off the engine of the economy—suspending business transactions and draining demand for credit—which allowed central banks, particularly the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, to flood financial markets with massive emergency monetary injections without triggering hyperinflation in the real economy. Looking at Europe, investigative journalist Michael Byrant says that €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the financial crisis in Europe alone in 2020.

This strategy was designed to stabilise and restructure the financial architecture by halting the flow of economic activity temporarily, enabling a multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Big Finance and large corporations under the guise of COVID relief. A bailout that dwarfed anything seen during the 2008 financial crisis.

Lockdowns not only destroyed small businesses and accelerated corporate consolidation, but—unlike the 2008 bailouts—this process faced little opposition, as it was justified as a public health necessity.

While COVID marked one phase of crisis management, the subsequent war in Ukraine has further accelerated these dynamics. It has served to redirect flows of energy, finance and industrial capacity. The destruction of Europe’s energy ties with Russia—via sanctions, decoupling and sabotage—engineered a forced dependency on high-cost US liquefied natural gas, delivering record profits to American fossil fuel firms (in 2022 alone, US LNG exports to the EU more than doubled—from 22 to 56 billion cubic metres—making up over half of all US LNG exports).

As European industries faltered under the weight of inflation and energy instability, the US subordinated its allies through enforced dependency while securing new opportunities for accumulation at home. Dollar supremacy was reinforced, compliance internalised and capital relocated under the banner of war. In this scenario, Europe has become both a very junior partner and collateral damage with its economic sovereignty sacrificed on the altar of transatlantic profit realignment.

The state, crisis and control

This brings us to a broader understanding of the state’s role in maintaining the economic system. The state and ideology are crucial for maintaining capitalism’s economic base, with the state intervening through financial support and strategic market expansion. At the same time, ideology shapes public perception and legitimises actions by re-framing individual freedoms and exploiting crises like COVID and Ukraine to manage dissent and uphold elite power.

This ideological reconfiguration aligns with technological transformation. The rise of artificial intelligence and advanced automation technologies—such as robotics, driverless vehicles, 3D printing, drone technology and even ‘farmerless farms’—will reshape the traditional mass labour force that underpins capitalist economic activity: it is being profoundly transformed and, ultimately, significantly reduced.

Looking ahead, as economic activity is restructured through these technologies, the entire social infrastructure built to reproduce labour—mass education, welfare, healthcare—will be rendered increasingly unnecessary because fewer workers are needed to sustain production and services. This transformation alters labour’s classical role as a seller of labour power to capital, fundamentally changing the dynamics of the labour-capital relationship.

The question is: if labour is defined in terms of its relation to capital and is the condition for the existence of the working class, why bother with maintaining or reproducing labour?

In this context of social erosion, neoliberalism has already weakened trade unions, suppressed wages and increased inequality. And now the message is: get used to being poor or on the scrapheap, and dissent will not be tolerated.

From surveillance to subjugation

The so-called ‘Great Reset anticipates a fundamental transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on liberties and mass surveillance.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has speculated about a future where people ‘rent’ rather than own goods (as seen in the widely circulated ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ video), raising concerns about the erosion of ownership rights under the rhetoric of a ‘green economy’, ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. Beyond this, these narratives also serve to cement social control.

Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.

To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of consumer-oriented neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.

In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulation-privatisation neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of the ‘nanny state’, trade unions and the collective in society.

We are currently seeing another ideological shift. As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by an economic impulse. This time, the collapsing neoliberal project.

The masses are being conditioned to get used to lower living standards and accept them. At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of mass immigration or supply shocks that both the Ukraine conflict and ‘the virus’ have caused.

The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor, but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.

Decreased consumption (your poverty) will be sold as being good for the planet by coopting the concept of ‘degrowth’; something to be imposed on the masses while elites continue to accumulate. This contrasts with genuine ecological or socialist degrowth proposals that would target elite consumption and redistribute resources.

Meanwhile, the framework is in place to ensure that huge corporations and the super-rich continue to rake in near-record profits through militarism, an energy transition, a food transition, speculative finance schemes involving land, carbon trading, data monetisation, surveillance capital, pharmaceuticals, green bonds, commodities and agribusiness, real estate and climate risk derivatives.

And there is always money available for Ukraine and various destabilisations around the world to further ensure the bottom line of giant corporations.

India as global microcosm

To illustrate global dynamics and the real-world impact of neoliberal policies, we can examine the case of India’s agricultural sector.

Structural adjustment programmes imposed by institutions like the IMF and World Bank or bilateral agreements with the US have forced countries like India to radically transform their agricultural sectors. Subsequent directives have demanded dismantling public support systems such as state-owned seed supply, subsidies and public agricultural institutions, while promoting export-oriented cash crops to earn foreign exchange.

This shift is part of a neoliberal agenda to further integrate agriculture into global capital markets, reduce the role of the public sector and open up the sector to foreign direct investment and multinational agribusiness corporations.

The outcome in India thus far has been devastating for millions of small-scale farmers and rural dwellers. Neoliberal reforms have led to spiralling input costs, dependency on proprietary seeds and agrochemicals and the erosion of traditional farming systems. This has resulted in widespread indebtedness, economic distress and a decline in the number of cultivators—millions have been pushed off the land, many driven to suicide, and hundreds of millions face jobless growth and rural displacement.

This restructuring facilitates the capture of agriculture by large agribusiness corporations and financial investors. These entities dominate global commodity trading and are increasingly consolidating control over seeds, inputs, logistics and retail. The public sector’s role is reduced to a facilitator of private capital, enabling the entrenchment of industrial, GMO-based commodity crop agriculture suited to corporate interests rather than local food security or ecological sustainability.

Contrast this with agroecology, a means to free farmers from dependency on manipulated commodity markets, unfair subsidies and food insecurity. Agroecology prioritises local food sovereignty, ecological sustainability and farmer knowledge, opposing the reductionist, industrial agriculture paradigm promoted by capitalist agribusiness.

In India, the policy of population displacement compels displaced rural workers to migrate to urban areas in search of precarious, low-paid employment or remain unemployed, swelling the ranks of a surplus labour force.

This reserve army of labour is not accidental but serves a strategic function within global capitalism. It helps suppress wages and weaken the bargaining power of workers and trade unions both in India and internationally. By maintaining a large pool of cheap and insecure labour, capital can discipline workers through competition and insecurity.

Moreover, many of these displaced Indian workers are absorbed into offshore factories and global supply chains, effectively acting as a tool to undermine labour rights and conditions in wealthier countries.

This analysis reflects the country’s incorporation into the global capitalist system, where rural displacement and labour ‘flexibility’ are central to maintaining capitalist dynamics.

There is a historical comparison to be made between the displacement of people from the land in England during the Industrial Revolution and the contemporary displacement of the peasantry in India under neoliberal capitalism. Just as the enclosure movement in England forcibly removed peasants from their land, pushing them into cities to become a labour force for emerging industrial capitalism, a similar process is unfolding in India today.

Benign language

This displacement is not simply a byproduct of ‘development’ but a deliberate process tied to capitalist accumulation and imperialist restructuring of agriculture, where local food systems and rural livelihoods are subordinated to corporate interests and global markets.

Global communications and business strategy company APCO Worldwide is a lobby agency with firm links to the Wall Street/corporate US establishment and facilitates its global agenda. Some years ago, following the 2008 financial crisis, APCO stated that India’s resilience in weathering the global downturn has made governments, policy makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of global capitalism.

Decoded, this means global capital moving into secure control of markets. Where agriculture is concerned, this hides behind emotive and seemingly altruistic rhetoric about ‘helping farmers’ and the need to ‘feed a burgeoning population’ (regardless of the fact this is exactly what India’s farmers have been doing). APCO talks about positioning international funds and facilitating corporations’ ability to exploit markets, sell products and secure profit.

And the state has been actively obliging. The plan is to displace the peasantry, create a land market and amalgamate landholdings to form larger farms that are more suited to international land investors and export-oriented industrial farming.

For instance, an MoU was entered into by the Indian government in April 2021 with Microsoft, allowing its local partner, CropData, to leverage a master database of farmers. CropData was to be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profiles of land held, production information and financial details.

The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution. The unstated aims are to impose a certain model of farming, promote profitable corporate technologies and products, encourage market (corporate) domination and create a land market by establishing a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country so that ownership can be identified and land can then be bought or taken away.

Globally, the financialisation of farmland accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. From 2008 to 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world. Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020.

Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation.

As far as India is concerned, it is becoming a fully incorporated subsidiary of global capitalism. Displaced farmers and farm workers are pushed into urban sectors like construction, manufacturing and services, despite these sectors not generating enough jobs. This displacement facilitates the replacement of labour-intensive, family-run farms with large-scale, mechanised monoculture enterprises controlled by a few powerful transnational agribusiness corporations and financial institutions.

Moreover, India is being directed to rely increasingly on its foreign exchange reserves to buy food on the international market as it is forced to eradicate its buffer food stocks.

This process is driven by pressure from global agribusiness and finance capital, which seek to dismantle India’s public food procurement and distribution systems, including the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the Public Distribution System (PDS). These state-backed mechanisms have historically ensured food security by maintaining strategic grain stocks and providing fair prices to farmers.

Eliminating these buffer stocks would mean that India would no longer physically hold and control its own food reserves. Instead, it would have to depend on volatile global markets to procure essential food supplies, using foreign currency reserves. This shift would make India vulnerable to price fluctuations, speculation by investment firms and manipulation by multinational corporations dominating global commodity markets.

The massive farmer protests in India were, in part, a resistance to these policies. Without buffer stocks, India would effectively be paying corporations such as Cargill to supply food, perhaps financed by borrowing on international markets.

Resistance and refusal

The narrative presented here reveals a deeply systemic crisis within capitalism—one that cannot be understood through isolated events, personality politics or short-term policy shifts.

From financialisation, predatory practices abroad and speculative markets to state-backed bailouts, war and digital surveillance, capitalism continually reinvents mechanisms to prolong its accumulation cycle.

This article exposes the underlying logic of an economic system marked by the increasing convergence of state and corporate power—a trajectory that points towards a shift away from ‘capitalism’, possibly towards a technocratic or even techno-feudalist system where e-commerce platforms, algorithms, programmable centralised currencies and monopolistic entities determine how we live.

Such developments raise urgent questions about the future shape of society and, crucially, how a mass movement might resist without being co-opted or subverted. Yet, recognising these dynamics is the essential first step in fostering informed debate and effective resistance.

However, the hegemonic class and its media and NGOs continue to divide the population along lines of race, religion, identity politics and immigration. They do anything and everything to sow division or sedate courtesy of gadgets, games, entertainment, infotainment and sports. Their media will do all it can to keep people in the dark about what is really happening and why.

But even when people do manage to see through the smokescreen, they will try to promote apathy, convincing people that nothing can be done about any of it anyway.

They will try anything to fragment opposition and suppress movements for systemic change.

That is not to say resistance is absent—far from it, especially in the realm of food and agriculture (discussed in my books on the global food system linked to at the end of this article).

The fightback against emerging digital authoritarianism is already underway and takes many forms: rights groups are challenging mass surveillance laws and practices in the courts; campaigns are mobilising to block or roll back digital ID schemes, facial recognition and mass data retention.

Mass mobilisations against surveillance infrastructure are growing, as are acts of refusal in the form of non-compliance with digital ID requirements, opt-outs and public data obfuscation campaigns. There is also a burgeoning movement to build and promote peer-to-peer, federated or blockchain-based social networks and communication tools and to develop grassroots internet infrastructure that bypasses state and corporate control.

International solidarity is crucial, too, to expose and resist the export of surveillance technologies and the global harmonisation of repressive policies.

Meanwhile hundreds of millions endure poverty and many more face declining living standards and welfare cuts. At the same time, the super-rich have stashed an estimated $50 trillion in hidden accounts (as of 2020) and have only grown wealthier in recent years.

And here lies the crux of the matter—economic power. While resistance to the surveillance state and digital authoritarianism is vital, the deeper struggle is against the concentration of wealth and control in the hands of a global corporate and financial elite.

Across the world, workers, peasants and communities are organising through strikes, land occupations, agroecology, seed and food sovereignty movements, debt resistance and the fight to reclaim public goods. The task is to build movements capable not only of resisting but of transforming the structures of economic power that underpin the entire system.

For further insight into all the issues discussed here, readers can access the author’s open-access books which can be read or downloaded on Figshare (no sign in or sign up required).

Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. You can read his two free books Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order and Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth here.

"The history of the decline and fall of the Anglo-American Empire" by Declan Hayes

 

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Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The history of the decline and fall of the Anglo-American Empire

Declan Hayes
July 1, 2025
© Photo: SCF

Although today’s massive wealth disparities are plain as day, it is important to note that wealth is now generally accumulated not by adding material value but by financial sleights of hand and therein is the crux of the matter.

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The five marks of the Roman decaying culture: Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth; Obsession with sex and perversions of sex; Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original; Widening disparity between very rich and very poor; Increased demand to live off the state.

Although the above quote is often erroneously attributed to Gibbon’s seminal The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it might more aptly be applied to the decay of the Anglo-American system which we are now living through in real time. If we sequentially go through them, we see social discourse being dominated by tittle tattle about celebrity nobodies and those nobodies often being elected to high office. What with Sir Keir Starmer having gangs of Ukrainian male prostitutes tailing him like he was a bitch in heat, degenerates like Jesuit top dog Fr Bill Currie being spit roasted on a nightly basis as top journalists dress in French maids’ uniforms to kiss the boots of black transexual prostitutes, and all such nobodies being in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book, their behaviour could just as well be from the set of 120 days of Sodom, which has been described as the sickest film of all time.

Le Soir, the liberal paper that spearheaded Belgium’s collaboration during the Nazi occupation, provides us with another relevant example of NATO hoisting themselves by their own petard as any praise for their liberal credentials in republishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons must be tempered by noting they hired Philippe Servaty, whose party piece was to ejaculate and and urinate into the faces of impoverished Moroccan women and post his “art” on the Internet before the women’s incensed relatives put a bounty on his head.

Talking of these degenerates, although what passes for Hunter Biden-style art today is barely worth a mention, we must note that our aesthetic tastes are continually being shaped by Zelensky’s Brownshirt enforcers, whose Pavlovian impulse is to swing a sledgehammer every time they hear Russian culture being mentioned. Whoever said that book burning had gone out of fashion?

Although today’s massive wealth disparities are plain as day, it is important to note that wealth is now generally accumulated not by adding material value but by financial sleights of hand and therein is the crux of the matter. Historically, we had two forms of economies, the stock-driven one of the Netherlands, Britain and America and the debt-driven one of Germany and Japan, both of which have been thoroughly derailed by the Anglo Americans, whose stock market based system was supposed to fund relatively risky ventures unsuited to the more risk averse debt financing the main Axis powers typified.

That idyllic Wall Street sheen is no more and the emphasis is now on milking captive audiences through needless pharmaceuticals, narcissistic purchases and nihilistic wars: that is where the money is and, as the politicians have long ago been bought off, there is no real protection for the ordinary citizen against any of these 5G forms of draining their wallets dry. Instead of trying to add value, the emphasis is on wasting weapons in NATO’s endless wars and knowing that the taxpayer will, at day’s end, have to pick up the tab for their profligacy. It is a risk free scam. As Craig Murray has recently pointed out, Wall Street’s hedge funds actually own the RAF’s Top Guns, meaning, firstly, that it is in their profit maximising interests to charge top dollar for the under performing junk Russia is turning into scrap metal in Ukraine and, secondly, that all Starmer, Trump, Kallas and von der Leyen are left with are their hedge funds, who scam the RAF and whatever other rich NATO pickings that HalliburtonBlackwater and BlackRock have not yet picked bare.

As for the ordinary public, who are not members of NATO’s self-selected elite, technology has made them largely irrelevant to the economy, except as unthinking consumers or, as is the case with Britain’s abortion-up-to-birth laws, as raw inputs into cosmetics and some similar luxury goods products. As for euthanasia, well why not? If the ordinary public cannot add value to the elite, why not put them down? Maybe, in this brave new world, Hitler and the Anglo-Americans, who inspired his Austrian death factories, had a point in all of that.

As it was then with the the boys, and girls, from Brazil, so is it now. The latest resurrected Nazi is Blaise Metreweli, whose grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, aka The Butcher, was one of Hitler’s chief Ukrainian collaborators, a notorious mass murderer and torturer for the Waffen-SS in Ukraine and the entire eastern front. Although the Waffen-SS still have their Russophilic critics, there is evidence galore that having friends and forefathers in that infamous group never did the careers of their families any harm in modern-day Blighty, or in Canada, the United States and Germany for that matter.

Although we are told the Waffen-SS are yesterday’s men because the ideological sheens the Anglo Americans used to oppose them are things of the past, with no more ongoing relevance than whatever drove the Assyrians or the Carthaginians on their own conquests all those millenia ago, their Nazi networks remain there to be activated when needed. Even though the Anglo-Americans still have the world’s most well-oiled and best performing propaganda industry, and even though they have the resources of Nazi families like the Butcher’s to draw on, they are losing their lustre because they can no longer innovate or regenerate to the degree that is needed.

Take the recent Iranian-Israeli dust up, where the Iranian missiles performed as I predicted. There will be no Iranian Operation Paperclip and Iran (the land of the Aryans), Persia if you prefer, will no longer be the buffer state it once was following the 1856/7 Anglo Persian war. When Iran puts its formidable missile technological know-how up for sale, their main customers will be the Russians and the Chinese, who are no slouches at the hard sums themselves, and that is not good news for the Anglo-Americans or the rust buckets masquerading as aircraft carriers they pin their faith on to control the world’s choke points.

And nor is it good news for the informal networks NATO uses as velvet handcuffs for the world’s satraps. I am referring here to military academies like Sandhurst and to the public schools like Harrow and Eton Sandhurst draws its dullards from. Why, except to engage in their BDSM hazing rituals, ape NATO’s toy soldiers when Iran and its allies are showing that victory in the Waterloos of the future will owe far more to the STEM researchers of China and Iran than they do to Paddington Bear and the playing fields of Eton?

The idea of giving Iran room to breathe or even having buffer states to stop the bigger elephants crashing into each other is now obsolete. The Baltic pimple states as well as Hitler’s former Finnish allies are now but staging posts to attack Russia and to hell with any Russian nuclear or other response as, in a perversion of Pascal’s wager, the risks of summoning Armageddon are well worth it for even the smallest chance of robbing Russia of its vast natural resources. Besides British guile and the long shot of dividing and conquering those who count, there seems no other way to dent Russia and those who stand with her.

If today’s Great Game was only confined to Russia’s southern and northern borders, then there might be hope. But look towards Africa and to the great Nile River where the intrigues of empire remain problematic. When Britain divided up the waters of the Nile between Sudan and Egypt, they omitted Ethiopia, which not only also needs that water but it is where the Nile actually begins its long march to the sea. As Ethiopia is now extending its own dam to the possible detriment of both Egypt and Sudan, expect more trouble in that volatile region, which, not so long ago, saw the Soviet Union fund Egypt’s Aswan dam, a move which helped Nasser pivot towards the anti Anglo-American Soviet bloc, from which it was afterwards half-wrested.

As Israel has recently annexed Syria’s water supply, just as it previously robbed the River Jordan from Jordan, expect all those postcolonial squabbles to come to bear when Russia and China become serious players in the region. And maybe even expect other countries to replace Israel as the area’s key choke point. The historical tides are currently changing course and patch quilt dykes here and there will not change matters when those titans tag team their way into the ring.

Whatever about the rise of China and Russia, the Anglo-Americans, like the Romans before them, are suffering from the problems centuries of privilege bring. They have thinned out their economies and their people, who are no longer the stout hearted peasantry Oliver Goldsmith pined about in The Deserted Village but are, instead, a sordid gaggle of degenerates Chinese vloggers and anthropologists scratch their heads in baffled bemusement about.

Critical though the fate of the Western empire is, it would not be imminently fatal if the sort of urgent remedial action Japan undertook in the post-Wars years to steady its own ship was taken. Though these steps would include a massive streamlining of NATO’s judicial and loan sharking systems, a massive crackdown on the drug and perversion industries and the mass internment of corrupt politicians and government functionaries, none of that can now happen as the West is on the different trajectory of robbing Europe of the last of its sovereign wealth and, as the ongoing Syrian genocide shows, to hell with the longer term consequences.

Far from being the idyll of liberal imperialism the West pretends to be, it is, in essence, a giant Ponzi scheme where the elite pick the pockets and, now, the vital organs of the rest, who no longer even have the right to decide how to dispose of their own bodies. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and similar French, Russian and German classics of the Victorian era show us things were not that different then, the only cultural difference being, perhaps, that more of us can read and write, an almost now-obsolete skill that was necessary to impart to the working class because of the great demand for lowly clerks towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Although there remains oases of goodwill throughout the Anglo American world, they resemble those Brideshead Revisited Catholic aristocrats of Olde Englande, who did not abandon their faith, mere puddles from the past, oddities of no greater strategic significance.

Instead of folk like Alexander Graham BellIsambard Kingdom BrunelThomas CrapperJohn DunlopThomas Edison and George Stephenson, all we now have is NATO mob boss Mark Rutte flaunting his sociopathic daddy issues to the world, and Bonny Blue, a British slapper, who is hailed as a hero because her party trick is to lie down and think of England as 1000 losers use her as their collective sperm bucket.

Although, given her demographics, China probably has countless similar losers, her core engineering capabilities far outclass anything the Anglo American empire can currently muster and, as for Bonny Blue, she is not that very different from von der Leyen and Kallas, who likewise would better belong in San Fernando Valley. Though the Anglo American empire will hobble on with von der Leyen, Kallas and Bonny Blue doing what they do best, just as Rome hobbled along up to and even after the fall of Constantinople, it no longer calls the shots. All we are left with are its jagged pieces, epitomised by Bonny Blue, Kaja Kallas, Keir Starmer, Fr Bill Currie and their Ukrainian rent boys. And, as for China’s future generations of anthropologists, vloggers and historians, they will wonder how these larpers ever took their ancestors for such an expensive ride.

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